It would be good if something came out of the Green Paper on Governance besides a row. Although the Green Paper is in important respects ill-informed and misguided, it also contains a some really good and interesting ideas that could usefully be implemented at once, while we all - the authors included - think what to do next.
What went wrong?
The Working Party on Governance did a poor job. Asked to think about recasting the reforms of five years ago, it decided instead to provide the University with a new constitution, for which nobody had asked. The proposals are more drastic than those of the North Report but were thrown together in a few weeks. Building on the good ideas, some really useful things can happen; if the authors dig in their heels, and refuse to rethink, damage will be done, and the University may find itself emulating Harvard in ways of the working party did not intend.
Unsurprisingly, they muddle governance, government, and management. Although some of the proposals could make extremely good sense, what we have is a bad answer to the wrong question. It is also a long on assertion and short on argument in a way that would embarrass an undergraduate essay.
Governance means accountability, first to the University, and then to the outside world. A "Board of Scrutiny" or an independent Audit Committee to assess the overall performance of us all, and more particularly that of the Senior Management Team (SMT), is an excellent idea. The notion of that "trustees" should fulfil this role is misguided; but a Board of Scrutiny as such would be an innovation to be welcomed.
Government is about securing the consent of everyone working in the University to common practices where these are needed, or to local ones where these are appropriate. I have worked in universities where a Senate sits and listens to what the SMT proposes and every year or two demurs at something. They do not disperse the "ownership" of the decisions, do not achieve transparency, and do not achieve accountability. They are common in provincial universities and ex-polytechnics where the dominance of the executive is taken for granted, and they are an improvement on the old regime of autocratic principals; they work well if - as at Harvard - faculty are substantially left to operate their own at autonomous research and teaching enterprises. Combining intrusive management with this model is a recipe for civil war - conducted nowadays in employment tribunals.
Oxford is a workers' cooperative and a federal institution; rational government follows the grain of the institution. Only someone who sees herself or himself as the servant and not the master of their colleagues should try to run a College or the University. Oxford is much loved because it fosters local loyalties, which should be nourished. We remain a great University on very scanty resources, operating only because of those loyalties. The proposals threaten to wreck what we most depend on.
Management failure is Oxford's real problem, and unaddressed by the Working Party. Wellington Square is sclerotic; much of it takes two months to do what a commercial organisation would do in two days; it is an open secret that the Finance Division has been unable to give a coherent account of the University's financial condition for the past several years; it is another open secret that Osiris* is a mystery to its users, and a waste of time and money. And who knows how Isidore** will turn out?
We have mimicked ten-year-old errors of business and government rather than learning from them. We have built expensive buildings without thinking ahead to maintenance and replacement, and without trying to use existing stock more effectively. The last round of governance reforms multiplied committees that have not achieved the intended outcome; EPSC is not entirely to blame, since it had to waste two years dealing with the QAA, but it has not maintained standards nor visibly tried to create an educational policy. We have moved many people into administrative positions and out of teaching and research, and have achieved only the multiplication of paper and mutual irritation.
None of these failures was caused by bad relations between the University and the Colleges, singly or collectively. So, why does the Green Paper focus so heavily on the interaction between colleges and the University? Two unkind thoughts are that the SMT panicked in the face of Richard Lambert's Report, and that a lot of buck-passing is going on, even though, outside the area of fund-raising, colleges have played no part whatever in what has gone wrong. A third unkind thought is that the SMT is too much moved by the bad press that Oxford gets because we are a highly political University. But bad press is part of the climate; all but two prime ministers since 1945 have been Oxford graduates and Oxford bears the weight of their desire for a UK version of Harvard on the cheap and their irritation because it can't be had.
The proposals imply that we should not try to educate the people who malign as - we still have no smart little London office with a couple of charming young graduates pumping out endless good news to press, politicians, civil servants, and businessmen - but that we should appease people who know nothing about us but enjoy offering their opinion. No business would run itself according to the instructions of journalists, politicians or academic passers-by. Persons who know nothing about us naturally seized on the most visible peculiarity of Oxford - its collegiate and federal nature - and blame everything on that. The working party should no us better.
What might be done?
Enough carping; how can we build on the good bits of the green paper while rejecting the bad ideas? Three obvious questions need answering: how might trustees be useful; do we need a Council of 160 persons; what do we need?
The University is a corporate body consisting of the Chancellor, Masters and Scholars. It cannot hand its responsibilities to Trustees. Trustees such as those of Princeton, or in the position of the Regents of the University of California, must own the university in the way the Harvard Corporation does, or be the agents of the State as in California. Why should congregation hand ownership of Oxford to trustees of that kind? Whether the corporation so created could simply inherit the powers of the existing institution under the Oxford and Cambridge Act is only the first of many questions. Colleges would have to pursue the question through the Privy Council and wherever else the proposed Statutes might take them; Fellows would violate their fiduciary duties if they allowed the University's taxation powers to be handed to a dozen non-members of the University chosen by the Vice-Chancellor of the day.
Nor do we need "trustees" because of impending charity legislation. There is no legislation yet; it must be re-introduced after the election, and it will have to survive scrutiny in committee; the proposal for Oxford, Cambridge, London and Durham is presently that Hefce - itself an institution whose future is uncertain - will be the "regulator," and that negotiations will establish what organizational arrangements are needed. There have been many promises that there need be no upheaval; but there is no real news in the public domain. It remains odd that the Working Party is so convinced that Oxford needs trustees when Cambridge is so firmly convinced that its existing structure of government is adequate.
Inverted comma "trustees" are a Board of Scrutiny. Such a Board would be a really excellent idea; it should in the first instance be the agent of Congregation in holding the SMT to account, and in the second the agent of the SMT in forcing members of Congregation to face the facts of life. It might plausibly be chosen half and half by each. Its attention should not be confined to financial issues; we are in the business of teaching and research, and facing the judgment of informed outsiders about everything we do would do us good, and would help a lot in public relations. It should not initiate policy, but the convention that it had a near-veto of what we propose would be useful.
The Academic Council, on the other hand, is an idea with no redeeming features. Creating a Council of 160 persons is a bizarre way to streamline business; the Conference of Colleges bogs down because it has 80 members, but because it is composed of Heads of House, it is undeferential. The Working Party's proposals are a very old-fashioned power grab: a Council twice the size of Conference is intended to be putty in hands of the SMT. If it systematically challenges the judgment of the Vice-Chancellor, dissenters will be shut up; and whatever happens, the real business will get done out of sight. Such a Council will do nothing for transparency - the Wellington Square tradition of hiding everything from the sight of the rank and file will not be cured by making 160 people waste three mornings a term listing to business of which nine tenths will be perfectly irrelevant.
The governance system certainly needs repair: mostly, it needs systematic committee-cide; named and accountable individuals should be in charge of named matters - we need Deans, not divisional boards and other fog-producing devices. The Green Paper leaves the clutter untouched and offers no proposals for more competent management. A more sensible sequence of changes is easy to imagine: the University has begun to get its finances under control, and could create a Board of Scrutiny, without opposition, to keep an eye on the process. Answerability and transparency would be assisted if the chairs of PRAC and EPSC had to answer to such a Board. We might even learn how we came to acquire Osiris*. Whether or not the Conference of Colleges continues, even the Working Party sees that we shall need Inter-collegiate mechanisms very like the Senior Tutors Committee and the Tutors for Graduates Committee. The trick is not for the SMT to micro-manage everything, but for it to let go of everything it can and focus on the big issues. Managing expensive science in a university where expensive science is a new phenomenon is a big enough job to be going on with.
The rest is less important than a change of outlook. Other than accounting systems, we could and should have borrowed much of what we needed in the past decade from Cambridge. We could have redone salary scales, we could have loosened the joint appointments system, and we could have done stint reform in six months; we could even have made admissions less complicated while we were at it. If we had done, we would have done more than the Working Party's proposals will to speed up decision-making. The important task is to do what the Working Party ignores, which is not to make decisions faster but to get more of them right. The Board of Scrutiny would help us do just that, which is why it is the one really good idea in the Green Paper. If the members of the Working Paper could go away and think that idea through, we should all be very grateful to them.
Alan Ryan is warden of New College, Oxford.
* Osiris is an attempt to standardise the university's accounting procedures, based on the Oracle system (click for explanation (html) - takes you out of www.akme).
** Isidore is the Oxford Student Administration Project (click for explanation (html) - takes you out of www.akme).
NOTE. Ryan's elegant contribution above was followed in the Oxford Magazine by a poem entitled A Fish who dies drowning with the instruction: "Only one line from each couplet should be read." - A. M.